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Confession, I avoid Apex like the plague. I don't want to know it myself, and don't expect any of my clients' in-house SFDC Admins to want to know it either. Yet whenever an Apex solution is created for them (by someone else at AspiraTech, never me) the client is forever dependent on a developer to maintain that functionality for them as their business process and related needs change over time. That is just not the way I like to work. I am all about teaching a person to fish instead of just giving them a fish. I love the ongoing relationships I have with my clients, but I want those relationships to be focused on my assisting them with additional solutions, not just tweaking the ones they already have because they are unable to adapt them themselves.

So I look for solutions that are provided within creative use of the standard user interface, VisualForce pages (which I then teach them to maintain), and AppExchange applications that have any needed Apex baked in.

One of my favorite Apps is Form Assembly. Though the product was originally created as a standalone website form service like Survey Monkey, it has grown to be something far more powerful than that with its SFDC integration.

With Form Assembly you can update any object in SFDC through your company's website. Want to collect feedback from your customers and have it added directly to their Contact record? Create a form using FA. Want to have forms on your website generate new records on a custom object you created, such as event registrations? FA feeds directly into custom objects. How about those pesky "Stay-in-Touch Requests" that send Contacts to a form to update their contact information, but then submit the form results to you as an email, requiring data entry to get the new info into their Contact record? Once again, FA to the rescue.

FA even offers PayPal integration, conditional fields (which SFDC does not offer), and calculated fields. I could go on and on about the many things I love about the app, and one of the best is its amazingly affordable $34/user/month price tag. Remember, the only user who needs the FA license is the one who will be creating the forms.

Honestly, the only thing I can say against FA is that they have made the puzzling decision not to make free trials available for even a week. I was therefore unable to demonstrate any of the SFDC integration for you in screenshots. The only trial I could access is one hosted on their site that is not integrated with SFDC, and even then you only get 2 hours of access, beginning as soon as you click the "Test Drive" button in AppExchange.

Come on folks. What do you think we are going to do, create a bunch of forms week one then not buy the service? It's only $34 per month! And it's such a great product, of course customers will want more than a week's access --though not us developers; hence our need to be able to access it to test use cases for our clients before putting them live in their systems. Give developers ongoing access without the ability to host forms on any site other than FA's and no ability to receive data from some critical field, like email, if you are really afraid of folks stealing access. And give the general public full access for just a week so that they can try it out without having to spend any money up front.

Apart from the irrational paranoia of the vendor, it really is a no-lose product, one every SFDC user should really consider implementing. With Form Assembly you get cross-object action without needing any Apex. One form can feed into multiple objects, creating needed records that are interdependent at the click of a "submit form" button. Skip the Apex and get Form Assembly.

Labels: CRM, Integration, Recommended_Apps, SaaS

When you go into a store, you expect there to be staff there whose primary job is to help customers like you find the products you want as efficiently as possible. If you wind up wandering around on your own for too long, unable to find what you're looking for or anyone who can answer your questions, you are likely to leave in frustration, empty handed.

So when it comes to your business and the customers wandering through your website, do you provide "in-store" assistance? Enter LivePerson, a technology that connects your sales staff with website visitors in real-time.

With LivePerson you can set business rules that alert sales staff when website visitors are engaging in certain behaviors that suggest they may be a high value potential sale that is about to head for the door. Sales staff can then reach out to them and essentially ask, "Can I help you find something?" If the person responds that they would like assistance, a chat conversation begins.

Just as in a store the sales assistant could either tell the customer which aisle to find the needed item in or walk them over to it and put it right in their hands, the LivePerson assistant can do the same. They can either explain the answer to a general question if that is what the customer needs, or find the product the person is looking for and "push" that page to the customer, so that they don't have to do anything themselves to navigate to it.

This is just one feature of what the LivePerson (LP) system can do for your business presence online. This business use alone has routinely accounted for a 20% increase in sales for the businesses who have implemented LP, which you can find out more about by reading their success stories. Customer post-sales support is another major area in which LP's approach to customer relationship success offers tremendous value.

I came across LivePerson when I was evaluating chat software services for a SalesForce.com CRM client who wanted to integrate chat with their SFDC customer service app. The two technologies work seamlessly together, with lead, account, contact and case data passing easily between the two applications. Check out this integration plug-in on the SFDC AppExchange.

My client wound up going with just one LP seat license to start, just to get a sense of how it would work for them, since they were skating a very thin profit margin at the time. (I would generally advise a more comprehensive approach to integrating the technology into one's business process, if you can possibly afford to do so right now.) The cost for them was a little under $100/month, which isn't the cheapest chat you can find, but it is the best value. With LP you get far more than just a chat application. You get a business system, complete with reporting and optimization services provided by LP. You are coached and guided through not only implementation of the technology, but through the fine tuning of your business process so that you take full advantage of what the technology can do for your business.

The return on investment with LivePerson seems to be so definite that it is hard to make the business case for not using it. That is, if you do in fact want people who visit your website to come away satisfied with their experience, while your bottom line takes a marked ascent.

Labels: Integration, Recommended_Apps

If Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was a revolutionary trend in business paradigms, Social CRM is the natural evolution that is upon us now. If you sell a product or service, or care about a cause you want to promote, you have simply got to be on Twitter. I have Twitter accounts both for my consulting business and for my non-profit volunteer work. I see dozens of new site visitors each day that arrive through tweets I post on Twitter, and you could too.

SalesForce.com CRM (SFDC) is the next part of that equation. With SFDC I can see which visitors submitted a form on the site and track them all the way through won opportunities if someone contracts for consulting services. I can then continue to service clients through a custom object I created called Projects and through Cases after service is provided. And of course, all of this is tracked in numerous ways by SFDC's campaign, reporting and dashboard features, so that I can increasingly make better decisions about how to most effectively let people who need what I offer know that they can get it here.

Toucan integrates these two powerful SaaS business technologies, so that you can not only take advantage of Twitter's marketing and PR power, but do so from within SalesForce.com. Just as you should be integrating your paid Google Adwords campaigns directly into SFDC, you should of course be integrating your free Twitter campaigns into SFDC also.

Of the tweets you've posted over the last month, which ones generated the most traffic to your website? Which tweets generated the most sales? Which tweets led to the shortest sales cycles? If you don't know the answers to these questions, you need Toucan and SalesForce. (If you don't already have SFDC, you can get a one month SalesForce.com Free trial here.)

Twitter is free, and Toucan is pretty close to free itself. If you have up to 25 SFDC users you can get a 1 year license for only $150. That's $150 for everyone, not per user, and not per month.

Instead of reiterating the same how-to material Toucan makes available themselves, I'll just point you to a couple helpful links:

2 minute Toucan intro video - Toucan for SalesForce Intro Video
Request the password for a 7 day free trial - email to
Get It Now link on AppExchange for after you receive the password - Get Toucan for SFDC

With the password you will receive a link to a two page configuration guide that includes helpful screenshots and step by step directions. I tried skipping that (rarely read directions on anything), but got stopped at my first step trying to just muddle through. So I suggest you take the 10 minutes to read the guide they send and just do it right the first time.

The only thing I found missing in the guide is that after you are done doing everything they list there you will want to add your Twitter ID under "Settings" within the Toucan app. That instruction is also not found within the user documentation they will send you a link to. You can't actually tweet anything through SFDC (like the initial message in a new campaign) until you enter your Twitter ID and password under Settings, as shown below:


The folks at Toucan are also very nice, and ready and willing to help at the drop of a hat. Give it a try and let me know what you think. I may also add to this post in another week, after playing with this longer and seeing the stats for the week.

Labels: CRM, Integration, marketing, PR, Recommended_Apps

Even if today's posting of leaked Twitter confidential information that was accessed through Google Docs has filled you with apprehension about relying on that platform for any sensitive parts of your business, hopefully you are not hesitant to use some great low-threat features like Google Calendar. SalesForce just put out a very straight-forward and instructive how-to video on integrating your Google Calendar into SFDC, and having it display on your home page instead of the SFDC internal calendar.

With this feature, if you have 20 employees sharing a Google calendar, but only 10 using SFDC, you can still see a calendar within SFDC that represents the entire company's calendar.

Link to: Google Calendar Integration How-To video

Labels: CRM, How-To, Integration, SaaS